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Suppressing email won't suppress spamming. As long as you have publicly
available contact information, allowing people you don't know to leave you a
message directly and cheaply, you will get spammed, no matter what the
media is. The only way to cut it down is to make it expensive (in time, space,
CPU or money) to send bulk messages.

"Expensive" has many meanings. I a spammer has to deploy huge resources in CPU or connectivity to send thousands of messages, spamming won't be an effective business anymore. It works with the current model of email because all the difficult work is done by the mail relays -- they work out which messages are deliverable or not, they route them, they bounce them, etc. etc. but the spammer may as well stick random characters in his To: and From: fields. Impose some constraint on those fields and spamming will be more difficult.

I'm not claiming that this is the only solution, or even that it's a solution at all. That's just an observation. It's too easy -- cheap -- to spam.

Yes, I am all in favor of making it harder/more expensive. I am just unwilling to extend that to an actual bill for sending email for normal users, even if it is only a "small amount," which is, in my experience, normally what people mean when they talk about making email "expensive" for spammers.

Also -- not that I feel bad for these people -- but who is going to pay the bill for virus spams, if we have pay-to-send email? People who are unwittingly sending out thousands of emails a day are not going to w

Yes. But that is easier to control, on a given site. For Slash, we could add a Spam moderation reason, and use Bayesian analysis -- once those moderations are meta-moderated to be Fair -- to recognize future Spam comments.